Union Membership In Ohio: See Recent Trends

OHIO — The upcoming Labor Day holiday celebrates workers in Ohio, and many of them are either members of, or represented by, unions.

Approximately 637,000 Ohioans were members of unions in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from earlier this year shows. That’s 13.2 percent of all Ohio workers.

That’s up from Ohio union numbers in 2019. About 610,000 workers were union members that year, accounting for 11.9 percent of wage and salary workers.

Buckeye State union membership is higher than the national average, which was 10.8 percent in 2020, according to the labor statistics bureau. The national union membership rate went up by 0.5 percent versus 2019.

Unions represent even more workers in Ohio, however. Those whose jobs were covered by a union or employee association contract in 2020 even though they themselves weren’t necessarily members, amounted to about 686,000 workers, about 14.2 percent of employees in the state.

Nationally, union membership in 2020 was much more common among public sector workers, 34.8 percent, compared with those in the private sector, 6.3 percent, the labor statistics bureau found in its report, which used membership data collected as part of the monthly Current Population Survey.

In the 28 states that are “right-to-work states, workers don’t have to join labor unions to benefit from the contracts negotiated by the union. Ohio is not a "right-to-work" state.

Unionization rates were the highest among workers in protective service operations (36.6 percent) and education, training and library occupations (35.9 percent). Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates in 2019 and 2020, the report found. South Carolina and North Carolina had the two lowest rates both years.

It was the Central Labor Union in New York City that started the first Monday of September holiday in 1882. Nearly 140 years later, the New York City Central Labor Council represents about 1.3 workers from every trade in the public and private sectors of the New York economy, according to its website.